Chapter 52
ABBY
In the yacht club office, I ask the young attendant to look again—you’re sure the Campbells let their membership lapse, and there’s no Paradox in a slip here?
—when Robert comes closer, pointing to his phone.
I follow him outside, expecting him to tell me for a third time that I’m on the wrong track.
He wanted to go find the orange Jaguar. Curtis would be nearby.
But I didn’t like it. That damn car, so obvious, so visible.
It’s a decoy. Why else would a man of bad intentions drive such a memorable vehicle?
Of course, Curtis was having a midlife crisis at the time, so it might have been a lapse in judgment, even for him. I look over at Robert, still busy on the phone.
A midlife crisis. And not the only thing he indulged. Is that the time he bought the sailboat, too? Not likely. His father gave the impression they had owned it a long time.
I try to remember what else Curtis said. I could have sold it, but the car’s a souvenir in a way.
I see, unbidden, the face of Harper McKibben again. I feel her hovering behind all of this.
Appetites long suppressed.
Less stable times.
A souvenir.
We all have those less stable times in our lives . . .
But he’s not going to get away with this one.
“They’re already searching?” Robert says into the phone. “Okay. Thanks, Pete. Next time you’re near Chicago . . .”
After hanging up he tells me, “Bad news is we can’t go with them, because they left the marina a half hour ago.
Good news is that they’re already on it.
Girl’s father didn’t put out an Amber Alert, because he assumed it wasn’t an abduction, just bad teen judgment.
She evidently texted him that she’d met a new friend at the Oshkosh docks.
When he couldn’t get her on the phone, he put in a call to the sheriff, asking him to keep an eye out. ”
“Oshkosh?” That’s twenty miles north.
“Thought she’d be home by two o’clock. At least she described the boat. Twenty-two-foot Catalina.”
“Trailerable size, right?” I say, remembering. “That’s why they don’t belong to the yacht club anymore.”
The sailboat in the framed photo in Sister Lucretia’s office looked elegant, but I know nothing about boat types and sizes. It was only the name that had struck me briefly. Paradox.
“The Coast Guard started the search from Fond du Lac, though?”
“That’s where the auxiliary is. No regular CG in Oshkosh, only sheriff’s boats. Anyway, Curtis’s car was in town—”
“Because he wants people to think he’s in Fond du Lac. Misdirection. An alibi.”
“Stop worrying.”
“But boats are pretty slow, right?”
“Coast Guard boats are faster. They’ll be putting word out to other boats in the area, looking.”
I shake my head. Lake Winnebago is an inland lake, but it’s huge. And can’t you go from the north side of Lake Winnebago up the Fox River into the whole Great Lakes system? Just go and go, and never come back?
Robert puts his hands on my shoulders. “She gave her dad the name of the boat. The CG got it from us, too, so they know we’re onto something. They’re taking this very seriously.”
My relief has seeped away. Dread has taken its place. “They’ve got a girl, Robert.”
“Curtis does, you mean.”
“No. Both of them. He’s talked Benjamin into something.”
“But Benjamin wouldn’t do anything to her—”
I think of Martha, and how I knew she would get hurt. Not die, but get hurt.
I think of the tire iron in my gym bag and how I’d like to hold it like a baseball bat and swing it, hard, right into Curtis’s skull.
“He might, Robert.”
“No, Abby.”
“You don’t understand, but I do.”
No more denial. Love, and no lies. It’s all gone too far.
And maybe this is the first time I get it: the real cost of unconditional love.
You have to truly know the condition before you can decide to accept it and keep loving, regardless.
Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn’t really pictured the worst that could happen.
What your kid could do. What he could become. Until then, it’s just empty promises.
I drive and Robert phones around until he’s connected with Sheriff Bruckner, in Oshkosh.
Twenty minutes later we’re at the dock, hurrying toward the sheriff’s boat, which still hasn’t left its slip, because the sheriff isn’t half as worried as we are.
He’s already put out a call to recreational boats in the area and no one has responded with a sighting yet, but it’s no problem, now. The Coast Guard is on its way.
Bruckner keeps talking about how short-staffed they are, down two men who are on vacation and won’t be back until July fourth week, their busiest time, when the real stuff happens, accidents and alcohol and you’d never imagine what people get up to.
Robert has a word with him, out of my earshot, and then he’s waving me over. We’re going. All of us.
“Thank you,” I whisper when I reach him. “What’d you tell him?”
“I promised I’d have you out of his hair in under two hours if we could just get going, but if he stayed here at the dock, all bets would be off.”
We’re motoring slowly out of the harbor when Benjamin’s phone starts buzzing again, but this time I grab it and answer in time.
“Mom!” Benjamin shouts. “Mom!”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing—Call the police! And Help!—but it’s disrupted by other people shouting, clatter and static, a girl’s voice, too.
The call drops.
Moments later, Curtis’s voice breaks through the crackle of the sheriff’s marine radio, asking for help.
“There you go.” The sheriff nods at Robert, avoiding my glance. “Mystery solved. Everyone accounted for.” He thought I was being hysterical from the start.
Curtis repeats the call. “Mayday, Mayday, this is Paradox. I am a twenty-two-foot white Catalina. One man aboard . . .”
I grab Robert from behind, pulling hard on his arm. “One man?”
The sheriff responds laconically. Curtis’s radio message is fragmented. The sheriff repeats back the location to confirm it, but there’s no response.
“He’s saying Mayday! Why is everyone so damn calm?”
Sheriff Bruckner turns to me. “That doesn’t mean he’s sinking. He may just have a broken motor or something. He should have said ‘Pan-pan’ but a lot of boaters, they think they’re the goddamn Titanic . . .”
Another crackle, Curtis’s voice barely audible. “Two . . . I can’t . . . board . . . Copy?”
“Did you hear that? Two overboard.”
“No ma’am. He said he only had one person on his boat.”
“Yes, because two are overboard! That’s my son and the girl! Benjamin and Lenora! Can’t we go any faster?”
We’re motoring into a stiff wind, the sky getting that green-gray tinge I associate with bad Midwestern weather, tornados, downpours, lightning. I smell it, too: that hyperoxygenated smell before the rains splash down.
“Why people are still out in this, you gotta wonder,” the sheriff says, turning back to steering, lips pressed thin.
In an outrageously slow maneuver, he passes a large pair of black binoculars directly in front of my face, blocking my vision, holding them out for Robert, who is too distracted to notice until I thump him on the back.
The sheriff drawls, “Paradox, did you report two people overboard . . . ?”
I step back into the open-air stern, hand on my gym bag, keeping a tight grip on my impulse to do something I may or may not regret. The motor kicks up to a higher whine, waves rushing past us, bow lifting higher, fresh water speckling my face. Finally. He didn’t believe me.
I point, shouting. “I can see it! That’s the Paradox!”
Robert calls back, his voice twangier ever since he started talking to Bruckner, goddamn chameleon, though I know it works. “We know, honey!”
Robert told me to make a good impression. Be calm and cooperative. Don’t make them think you’re crazy; don’t say anything incriminating about Curtis or about Benjamin either. You don’t know what we’re walking into. You might be forced to repeat all of it on a witness stand. Watch your mouth.
He was right. I’m watching it.
Even if Benjamin did something to the girl, I still love him.
I always will.
I sit with that for a moment, expecting the feeling to fall away, like water poured into the cup of your hand.
But it doesn’t. It stays. I think of the day he was born, the first time I saw his face, the first time I heard him cry.
Everyone was innocent at one time. Everyone needs one person, no matter what they’ve done or who they’ve become. I tell myself to remember that.
Whatever happened, they’re both in danger now, in the water. There’s no telling how far the Paradox has moved. The newspaper story about Curtis’s dead wife and daughter flashes into my mind. Bodies found washed up in Indiana, weeks later.
“Benjamin!” I scream at the top of my lungs, over the water, even though I can’t see anything. “Lenora!”
Dark clouds send ribbons of light and shadow over the choppy gray waters.
The waves are small but irregular. Ahead and to the right, at one o’clock, I see a glint of something rising up from a patch of confused water.
The sheriff’s boat swerves left, and I try not to lose sight of the area as it moves from one to two o’clock and then even farther to the right, almost three o’clock.
A cloud parts and a bright ray of light strikes the water and it doesn’t help, it only highlights a horizontal band of water where there’s nothing except for glinting chop. Diamonds sparkling across a graveyard.
I shout for Robert to come out back and I try to point out the spot as we continue veering away from it. “Keep looking! Do you see anything?”
Up at the controls, the sheriff is busy over the radio, talking to the Coast Guard, and meanwhile steering up close to the Paradox, which seems to be dead in the water, several hundred feet away.
“There!” I shout again. A thousand feet or more beyond the boat. A spot so far and pale it could be anything. A plastic bag, a lost buoy, a silver beer can. “Do you see?”
Robert raises the binocs. I dare not glance away from the place I’m tracking.
I urge him, “We need to tell the sheriff to aim for that spot, first.”
“He won’t. He’s set on boarding the boat.”
The Paradox pivots slowly, presenting its side to us, and then its stern, with Curtis at the back, waving and beckoning.
“But if they’re out there?” I reach for the binoculars, but by the time I have them up, I’ve lost it. “Did you see anything?”
“I’m not sure.”
We’re so close now to the Paradox that I can hear Curtis’s voice, and the sheriff replying. The former, distraught. The latter, still laconic, but lower pitched. The serious voice of a man talking to another man. Believing him.
Curtis is saying something about teens. Drinking. Swimming. A problem with the engine. A problem with the radio. And between every one of Curtis’s phrases, the sheriff’s “uh-huh,” “uh-huh,” “uh-huh.”
From behind us to the right, five o’clock, another boat speeds into view—the Coast Guard Auxiliary.
It passes behind us, pushing a deep V of white churning water in front of its bow, slowing for barely twenty seconds before it accelerates again.
It keeps going, past the Paradox, even farther past the place I thought I might have seen a face, a hand, something.
Taking directions from the sheriff. From Curtis.
“This is just another way to stall,” I shout to Robert. “He knows where they went overboard. He’s going to direct everyone to the wrong place.”
I lift the binoculars to my eyes, scanning the horizon, breaking it into organized strips, like mowing a lawn.
Back and forth, back and forth, until I’m startled by a wave striking hard against our stern, the Coast Guard boat’s wake.
I lurch forward, catching myself just in time. What did I see? What did I miss?
A flash of white, and then a flash of neon orange, but then the orange vanishes beneath gray waves. I grip the textured rubber and push the binocs so hard into my face it hurts, while a series of lesser waves slap our stern like a series of punishing laughs.